NASA’s New Horizons Kuiper Belt mission woke in good health after nearly a year in hibernation, resuming work nearly 6 billion miles beyond Pluto. The spacecraft entered hibernation last August and is now set to start sending back the data it collected while it was asleep.
New Horizons is 5.9 billion miles from Earth, and its radio signals take around 9 hours to reach home. Over the last 321 days, it has kept gathering information while most other systems were powered down.
Alice Bowman and New Horizons
Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, said the spacecraft stayed healthy throughout that period. “Every status report through this hibernation period was 'green,' meaning all was well aboard New Horizons each and every week,” she said in a NASA statement.
That weekly report matters because New Horizons spends long stretches far from Earth, traveling between the solar system’s most remote objects and collecting data with little day-to-day intervention. The probe is the first and only flyby spacecraft to conduct a flyby of the Pluto system, which it did in 2015.
Pluto, Arrokoth and beyond
Four years after the Pluto flyby, New Horizons studied Arrokoth while it was one billion miles past Pluto. The spacecraft has continued pushing outward through the Kuiper Belt, where it is studying objects beyond Neptune while speeding away from Earth at a rate of 300 million miles per year.
Its return to active operations comes with a new assignment already lined up. Three weeks from now, New Horizons will begin conducting a study of hydrogen in the outer heliosphere, gathering data at the farthest reaches of the solar system.
Voyager and the heliosphere
NASA said the data it is collecting there is the first of its kind. Two spacecraft have crossed the termination shock before, and NASA’s twin Voyager probes were the only spacecraft to do so before New Horizons’ current work.
For New Horizons, the immediate next step is simple: transmit the stored information from the last 321 days, then continue toward the outer heliosphere study. The spacecraft is healthy, far from Earth, and back on schedule for the next stretch of its journey.
